Spill Baby Spill? The 5,000 Alberta Oil Spills Industry Would Prefer You Did Not Know About

Spill Baby Spill? The 5,000 Alberta Oil Spills Industry Would Prefer You Did Not Know About

Right now, the oil and gas industry is holding its breath as the approval of two major tar sands pipelines hang in the balance. The $13 billion Keystone XL pipeline would significantly increase the Canadian export of of dirty tar sands bitumen to the U.S. by as much as 510,000 barrels a day. And, on this side of the border, the ferociously debated $5.5 billion, 1,170 kilometre Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline would carry dirty tar sands bitumen to Kitimat, B.C., where it would be loaded onto supertankers bound for growing energy markets in Asia.

As the decisions near, a series of major oil spills in the last year have highlighted the dangers these two pipelines pose, particularly given the major expansion of tar sands production they would enable.

The pipeline currently carries up to 591,000 barrels a day of crude from northern Alberta to the oil-storage crossroads in Oklahoma and refineries in Illinois. TransCanada is seeking approvalfrom the U.S. State Department to expand the Keystone system to 1.1 million barrels a day and to extend it from Cushing, Oklahoma to refineries on the U.S. Gulf coast. A decision is expected this year.

In addition to the North Dakota leak, Enbridge announced yesterday that it discovered a small leak on its Norman Wells line in the Northwest Territories. The spill’s effects were likely mitigated because the line had already been shut down due to a major spill in Alberta on April 29th, when 28,000 barrels of oil spilled from the rupture of a Plains All American Pipeline. The spill is Alberta’s worst in 35 years, and was more than a third larger than the spill that rocked Michigan in 2010.

On April 30th, Plains Midstream Canada, the Canadian subsidiary of Plains All American, quietly issued a press release informing the public of the crude spill from the Rainbow Pipeline in northern Alberta near Little Buffalo, AB. The spill was thought to be small, and it took a full four days for Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) to issue an announcement that a major spill had occurred.

The ERCB and industry have been under fire for failing to disclose details about the major spill earlier. According to NDPMLA Rachel Notley, “we did not get public notice of the extent of this breach until Tuesday, the day after the federal election”. The Pembina Institute’s Chris Severson-Baker raised concerns about how slowly information has been to get to Albertans and Canadians.

Industry and government would have us believe that pipeline spills are few and far between. Indeed, Plains Midstream Canada maintains that the Alberta spill was a one-time event.

In reality, spills are commonplace. After researching the 1975 spill that is considered Alberta’s largest in history (gushing 6.5 million litres of oil), Sean Kheraj learned that Alberta has a long and troubled history of oil spills. According to his research, pipeline failures have been a regular occurrence since the 1970s.

A 2007 report by the Alberta Energy Utilities Board on pipeline performance found that between 1990 and 2005, there were nearly 5,000 pipeline releases of hydrocarbon liquids. 4,717 spills released less than 1,000 litres of oil, 46 released between 100,000 litres and 1 million litres, and 6 released between 1 million and 10 million litres.

Then, that same year, two separate pipeline ruptures released 158,000 litres of crude into Freeman River and Lake. In 1971, Imperial Oil was responsible for a 4.5 million litre spill west of Edmonton. Two years later, a Gulf Alberta pipeline burst near Camrose spilled roughly 1.1 million litres of crude oil. Through the latter part of the 1970s, a series of spills ravaged Alberta including an Interprovincial Pipeline Company leak in Killam, Alberta that spilled 3 million litres of oil.

Alberta’s pipelines are particularly prone to leak. A 2011 report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) noted that Alberta has suffered 218 spills greater than 100 litres per 10,000 miles of pipeline caused by internal corrosion from 2002 to 2010, compared to the rate of 13.6 spills greater than 100 litres per 10,000 miles of pipeline from internal corrosion reported in the United States.

Tar sands crude is proven to be more acidic and sulphuric than conventional crude oil and contains 15-20 times higher acid concentrations. The additional sulphur in tar sands crude weakens and embrittles pipelines.

And that’s exactly what happened to the Rainbow pipeline that blew in Alberta. In 2006, corrosion in the Rainbow pipeline caused 1.3 million litres of crude to leak near Slave Lake.

Spills in Alberta are not a thing of the past. And, despite what industry says, they are not few and far between. With nearly 5,000 spills over the last 30 years, our dirty oil addiction is even more destructive than we realize.

An investigation into the cause of the recent breach has begun, and while it could take many weeks, the 44 year old pipeline could reopen in the next few days.

While Alberta’s environment minister, Rob Renner, has already apologized to Aboriginal leaders in northern Alberta for the spill, the true damage won’t be known for a long time.

Renner openly admitted that the province and industry should have done a better job of communicating with local communities after the spill. But while he criticizes his government and industry, he also praises them for containing the spill to a small area.

Yet, given the long history of oil spills in Alberta, praise for containing the spills is effectively a dangerous lowering of the bar. It should not be a question of how well the spills are contained, it should be a question of preventing the spills from happening at all.

While the damage from spills is downplayed, the economic benefits of the tar sands are often exaggerated as well. The age-old argument that Alberta’s tar sands are central to the Canadian economy, and that like it or not, we just can’t afford to cap their pollution is moot.

The Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) demonstrate that the tar sands only accounted for 1.5 percent of Canadian GDP in 2000, and they only expected that number to rise to 3 percent by 2020. In his recent series in Vancouver Observer, Barry Saxifridge argued that the vast majority of tar sands profits remain in Alberta. Of the 10% of profits that leave Alberta, only 0.2 percent is left for the rest of Canadians.

Translation? The economic benefits of the tar sands are massively over-hyped.

Why would Canada want two more major tar sands pipelines to be built, knowing full well that they will leak,when we can’t even stop leaks from the existing pipelines that are already threatening water and wildlife? How many more spills must happen - many out of the media’s eye - before we realize that our addiction to dirty oil is a recipe for disaster?

Previous Comments

Secondly, the NRDC can not be trusted on any of this type of data. They are data manipulators, not honest reporters of the facts. (And, they don’t pay their bills either from what I hear.)

As for the economic benefits of the tarsands. They are hardly over-rated. Employment in the tarsands rescued Newfoundland’s workers when their cod industry collapsed and taxes paid by oil companies provide massive amounts of money in equalization payments to other provinces to provide services like health care, education and childcare.

The main stream media also cannot be trusted to honestly report the facts, controlled that they are by fatheads aiming for social control when they cannot stop earthquakes and tsunamis yet that has killed more than any other gruesome acts have that are more overrated in the media than the natural disasters against which the bloated man - who is nothing but a tiny creature in the Almightys Creation, cannot do anything about.

Blogs are written by gutful people aiming for good but sadly but of course not recognized by fatheads who imagine they control the world when basically they cannot even control themselves as has been seen for centuries that no man has still been able to stop natural disasters, so what is all this bloating of man about? Eh?

Since pipelines are seriously vulnerable to breakdown and decay, maybe the only answer is the good old-fashioned mode of reliable transportation: railways. http://home.ca.inter.net/~jhwalsh/oilsands.pdf

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.

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